Related papers: The persistence of wishful thinking: Response to "…
We examine critically the claims made by Fredrickson and Losada (2005) concerning the construct known as the "positivity ratio". We find no theoretical or empirical justification for the use of differential equations drawn from fluid…
We demonstrate that the concerns expressed by Garcia et al. are misplaced, due to (1) a misreading of our findings in [1]; (2) a widespread failure to examine and present words in support of asserted summary quantities based on word usage…
Positivity, the assumption that every unique combination of confounding variables that occurs in a population has a non-zero probability of an action, can be further delineated as deterministic positivity and stochastic positivity. Here, we…
This is a response to five comments [American Psychologist 69, 626-629 and 632-635 (2014)] on our article arXiv:1307.7006.
In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration (OSC) (Nosek et al 2015) published a highly influential paper which claimed that a large fraction of published results in the psychological sciences were not reproducible. In this article we review…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
The field of psychological sciences has been grappling with the replicability crisis. Various issues have been identified as potential sources of this problem. We bring to light a potential source that has largely been overlooked and…
Mining 29,000 accounting ratios for t-statistics $> 2.0$ leads to cross-sectional return predictability similar to the peer review process. For both, $\approx50\%$ of predictability remains after the original sample periods. This finding…
We develop a model of wishful thinking that incorporates the costs and benefits of biased beliefs. We establish the connection between distorted beliefs and risk, revealing how wishful thinking can be understood in terms of risk measures.…
Fisherian randomization inference is often dismissed as testing an uninteresting and implausible hypothesis: the sharp null of no effects whatsoever. We show that this view is overly narrow. Many randomization tests are also valid under a…
Thousands of experiments are analyzed and papers are published each year involving the statistical analysis of grouped data. While this area of statistics is often perceived -- somewhat naively -- as saturated, several misconceptions still…
Phase III randomized clinical trials play a monumentally critical role in the evaluation of new medical products. Because of the intrinsic nature of uncertainty embedded in our capability in assessing the efficacy of a medical product,…
Improvements in large language models have led to increasing optimism that they can serve as reliable evaluators of natural language generation outputs. In this paper, we challenge this optimism by thoroughly re-evaluating five…
We report our efforts in identifying a set of previous human evaluations in NLP that would be suitable for a coordinated study examining what makes human evaluations in NLP more/less reproducible. We present our results and findings, which…
The last decades saw dramatic progress in brain research. These advances were often buttressed by probing single variables to make circumscribed discoveries, typically through null hypothesis significance testing. New ways for generating…
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, brains, markets, and climate are often diagnosed as signs of approaching a tipping point, i.e. a critical bifurcation where stability is lost. Here we reveal a broader and more deceptive mechanism:…
In the article Positive Dynamic Programming, David Blackwell tries to answer the question concerning the existence of optimal stationary strategies for a positive dynamic programming problem. The principal results obtained in the paper are…
Statistics has made tremendous advances since the times of Fisher, Neyman, Jeffreys, and others, but the fundamental and practically relevant questions about probability and inference that puzzled our founding fathers remain unanswered. To…
This is an epistemological approach to errors in both inference and risk management, leading to necessary structural properties for the probability distribution. Many mechanisms have been used to show the emergence of fat tails. Here we…
We present a model elucidating wishful thinking, which comprehensively incorporates both the costs and benefits associated with biased beliefs. Our findings reveal that wishful thinking behavior can be characterized as equivalent to…